This invention relates to gripper apparatus for transferring electric motor components in both directions between a conveyor of an electric motor component production line and individual workstations along the production line. In particular, this invention relates to such gripper apparatus which can accommodate components of various sizes with little or no special setup to vary the size, and to such gripper apparatus having integral apparatus for rotating components to desired angular orientations.
In production lines for electric motor components--e.g., production lines for armatures or stators--it is customary for the components, in their various stages of formation, to travel along a conveyor, alongside of which are disposed various workstations for performing the different operations necessary to form the components. In such a production line, the component is removed from the conveyor by appropriate robotic or other transfer apparatus, moved to the workstation and held there while that workstation's operation is performed, and then returned to the conveyor.
The transfer apparatus usually includes a gripper for actually picking up and holding the component. Frequently, the gripper also rotationally indexes the component if the particular workstation requires a particular angular orientation of the component to perform its operation.
When assembling motors of different sizes, it is usually necessary to reconfigure the production line to accommodate the different-sized components, such as armatures. Such reconfiguration includes removing the grippers at each workstation and replacing them with grippers of a different size. Grippers that can handle more than one size are not generally available. Providing a gripper that can handle components of more than one size is particularly complicated when the component must be rotationally indexed. Rotational indexing is frequently measured in the case of armatures by the positions of the core slots, which have a defined angular spacing. However, in armatures of different sizes, the angular spacing of the core slots can differ.
It would be desirable to be able to provide gripper apparatus for electric motor components that can be used to grip components of different sizes.
It would also be desirable to be able to provide such gripper apparatus that can rotationally index electric motor components of different sizes.